Inner Child, Outer Destruction

 

As I’ve begun to explore in my previous post, the consultant/client relationship is fraught with danger. Last week I discussed the difficulties inherent in assuming that any consultant – almost by definition a newcomer to the macro organization – could possibly attain the inside knowledge needed to successfully analyze the managerial pathologies buried deep within the client’s business model. Now, I’m going to turn my acerbic gaze at the other end of the board room table, to the client. Even in those cases where the consultant hired is perfect, and perfectly candid, there’s a very real barrier to the recommendations actually being implemented: it’s the inner child.

In 1964 Eric Burne published his best-seller Games People Play. In it, he asserted three crypto-Freudian aspects of the persona: the child, the adult, and the parent. He also postulated that, when we interact with others, these three aspects can align – my adult, for example, engaging my readers’ adults – or else they can clash (risk managers attempting to write like adults, for example), leading to interactional conflict.

Burne also theorized that we run scripts in our heads, a kind of on-going narrative. In my (not-yet bestselling) second book, I took that idea a step further: I maintain that we actually have three scripts, or one narrative fulfilling three purposes:

·         The child narrative tells us who we are to ourselves,

·         The adult narrative guides how we interact with others, and

·         The parent script pushes us on how we ought to view ourselves and interact with others.

Of the three, the child narrative is most difficult. I believe that we all maintain some delusions in our narratives. Sometimes they’re small and inconsequential (my second book will start selling like gangbusters here, real soon). Other times they’re not so small, or inconsequential. To what we should aspire is not that difficult to change; how we ought to interact with others, while a bit more uncomfortable, can stand correction. But who we are to ourselves – that narrative is extremely painful to change, even in the least little bit.

So, you’re the perfect consultant, sitting across from the client at the conference room table. You have been called in to review the business and its functioning, and report back to your customer on why the organization is highly vexed by a particular problem, or set of problems. Here’s my question:

Is it reasonable to assume that what you have to say will not be painful to hear?

The organization is the sum total of the decisions of its members. Those members with higher levels of responsibility make the choices that have the most far-reaching effects, and the CEO, by extension, has the highest level of accountability for those instances where pathologies have been allowed in to the business model. When significant delusions fuel the narrative that tells the organization who it is to itself, and those delusions are brought before the cold analysis of the outsider, the result is not unlike dropping metallic sodium into rain puddles.

I read a quote recently, and I’m sorry that I can’t accurately attribute it. It may have come from the limitless Jonah Goldberg. A paraphrase is “The truth does not illuminate. It enrages.”

It follows, then, that the consultant has some choices, none of them particularly appealing. She can tell the truth, fulfilling her original charter and accomplishing the mission put before her, but risk enraging the client beyond any possibility of call-back. She can fudge on the truth, taking the politically expedient position that infuriating her client will only lose future business, while making a somewhat less-robust report on the true nature of the difficulties she has analyzed, and hope for future opportunities with the same client.

Or she can lie outright, pinning the blame for the vexing issues on the known enemies of the organization, both internal and external, confident that, by reinforcing the organization’s leaders’ child persona, she will be invited back for more “analysis” work.

Given these options, it’s easy for my dear readers to assume they would make the right choice, being so positioned. But keep in mind – we’re not dealing with the client’s parent, or even adult narrative here. It’s the highly emotional, irrational child’s, and appealing to its sense of proportion is risky, at best (Hey! Maybe the risk managers can compute the odds here!).